One Nerd's Journey

Category: Resources

There’s been a concerted move toward digital distribution of games for the last few years, and now – with the introduction of Stadia – Google are pushing streaming only (not withstanding the technical hurdles of ‘the last mile’). It means having physical versions of games, or even long-term playing ability, is becoming a thing of … More Dumping and preserving Atari 8-bit cassettes

The free OpenEmu is great for running all sorts of emulators on your Mac with a beautiful frontend, and I heartily recommend it for consoles and computers, but its MAME support is classed as ‘experimental’ – indeed, you need to download a separate build to get MAME supported at all. It works great for most … More Running the MAME arcade emulator on Mac OS X

Originally published: 20th July 2018. Updated: 8th September 2018. Updated again: 29th November 2018. The ODroid Go is a great little handheld that requires minimal building, and runs a variety of emulators (at the time of writing: NES, GameBoy, GameBoy Color, Master System, Game Gear and ColecoVision from the built-in Springboard app, and separate Atari … More Flashing ODroid Go firmware on a Mac

I recently bought an Atari 800XE. Having had an 800XL as a kid, when re-buying all of the systems I once had, that was the first I rebought. I love it, and it’s definitely my favourite 8-bit of all time, even pipping the C64. Then an opportunity arose to get 2x 65XEs for a steal. … More Spray-painting the Atari XE line of 8-bits

Something somebody had posted to Facebook a few days ago caught my attention. It was a way of modifying the default bash login screen to make it look like the initial screen you see when you power on a Commodore 64. The page linked to was this one, but I thought it could be improved … More C64 Bash login in OS X

As a kid, I didn’t buy too many games other than budget releases, so relied on magazine cover tapes to fill the gaps. I distinctly remembered playing the Thunderblade demo to death, so I found out which Zzap! cover tape it was on, and re-bought it. I thought it would be nice to make a … More Zzap! 64 Mega-Tape 3 Inlay

Of all my retro computers and consoles, my Atari 800XL will forever be closest to my heart. Like most systems these days, there is an SD card solution for running executables on it, called the SIO2SD. The awesome Lotharek produces a lovely, cased device, but others are available – or you can build your own! … More Atari SIO2SD – Instructions